[box]Orchestration is the automated configuration, management, and coordination of computer systems, applications, and services. Orchestration helps IT to more easily manage complex tasks and workflows.[/box]
IT teams must manage many servers and applications, but doing so manually isn’t a scalable strategy. The more complex an IT system, the more complex managing all the moving parts can become. The need to combine multiple automated tasks and their configurations across groups of systems or machines increases. That’s where orchestration can help.
Automation and orchestration are different, but related concepts. Automation helps make your business more efficient by reducing or replacing human interaction with IT systems and instead using software to perform tasks in order to reduce cost, complexity, and errors.
In general, automation refers to automating a single task. This is different from orchestration, which is how you can automate a process or workflow that involves many steps across multiple disparate systems. When you start by building automation into your processes, you can then orchestrate them to run automatically.
IT orchestration also helps you to streamline and optimize frequently occurring processes and workflows, which can support a DevOps approach and help your team deploy applications more quickly
You can use orchestration to automate IT processes such as server provisioning, incident management, cloud orchestration, database management, application orchestration, and many other tasks and workflows.
[box]Container Orchestration[/box]
Container orchestration is the process of automating the management of container-based microservice applications across multiple clusters. This concept is becoming increasingly popular within organizations. Alongside it, a wide array of Container Orchestration tools have become essential in deploying microservice-based applications.
Modern software development is no longer monolithic. Instead, it creates component-based applications that reside inside multiple containers. These scalable and adjustable containers come together and coordinate to perform a specific function or microservice. They can span across many clusters depending on the complexity of the application and other needs such as load balancing.
Containers package together application code and their dependencies. They obtain the necessary resources from physical or virtual hosts to work efficiently. When complex systems are developed as containers, proper organization and prioritization are required when clustering them for deployment.
That is where Container orchestration tools come in to play along with numerous advantages, such as:
- Better environmental adaptability and portability.
- Effortless deploying and managing.
- Higher scalability.
- Stabler virtualization of OS resources.
- Constant availability and redundancy.
- Handles and spread application load evenly across the system.
- Improved networking within the application.
Top orchestration tools :
- Kubernetes (K8s)
- Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
- IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
- Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
- Azure Service Fabric
- Docker Compose
- Docker Swarm
- OpenShift